An Empirical Study On Working Memory In The Interpreting Process From The Perspective Of Neuropsychology

As a special language-processing activity, the act of interpreting represents itsoutstanding impromptu and instantaneity feature. Different from written translation,the interpreters have hardly no time or chances to understand the information in theoriginal language but a one-time job. They take the notes and sometimes complete themission of listening, differentiating and understanding the superficial characteristicsof the meanings and information in the original language, finishing the temporalinformation storage, organizing and planning of the target language, expressing andsupervising the information’s output, etc., even without any external assistance of anykind. These missions affect and restrict each other, and interpreters sometimes have toprocess all of them at the same time, to make it possible that people using differentlanguages can exchange ideas and understand each other. Obviously, in this process,interpreters should be equipped with excellent information storage and processingability to make sure that they can accurately understand the original information,pierce together the contextual information and integrate the expressions in targetlanguage and the original information. That is to say, the interpreting activity is agreat challenge and pressure to the interpreters and their fabulous memory ability oflanguages’ information becomes one of the most essential conditions of a successfulinterpreting performance. Therefore, working memory with the feature of short-termmemory, representing memory abilities, becomes the key cognitive quality of asuccess interpreting activity, and the developing studies on interpreting and memorymake people understand the characteristics and features of the memory elements inthe interpreting process more scientifically.Due to the uncertainty of the interpreting scene’s surrounding environments, theinterpreters’ basic language abilities and psychological qualities, the various difficultylevels of the target materials, the interpreters’ performances would be effected more orless. However, years of theory studies on interpreting and memory mostly focused oncognitive psychology, and few or none of them has ever involved the knowledge of neuropsychology. Thus, the thesis is based on an empirical study, including a series ofexperiments and questionnaire. The experimental subjects are divided into threedifferent groups according to the results of the basic language and backgroundknowledge test. Through the basic language knowledge test, the working memory’scoordinating ability test, Reading Span Test, the pressure test, etc., the thesis proves asfollows,(1). The stronger or weaker the basic language abilities that the interpretersgain, the less they would be influenced by the external factors or psychologicalchanges.(2). The stronger the interpreters’ basic language abilities, the more enrichedpractical experience they gain, and the stronger the coordination ability of theirworking memory would become.(3). The interpreting activities could help improvethe working memory ability.(4). To improve the working memory ability duringinterpreting process, the interpreting memory training and practices were not alwayshelpful, but the training of the specialized interpreting skills might do, etc. Theexperimental results are all scientifically analyzed by the SPSS software. In addition,through the process of designing, handing-out and data collecting of the questionnaireon working memory and its several influential factors in the interpreting processincluding physiological changes, it demonstrated the various understandings of thenon-English major people, interpreting learners and the professional interpreters tothis topic. Then the data were analyzed with the relevant neuropsychology theory andthe interpreting researches, some suggestions to the improvements of thepsychological qualities during the interpreting process were put forward in the lastpart of the thesis, which showed the practical guiding significance. Through thecombination of neuropsychological theories and the pass studies on interpreting andmemory, the thesis gives a brief analysis of several influential factors in workingmemory’s performance in the interpreting process, and thus offering a new way of thefurther study on interpreting researches and practices.